international-relations

Hanging Over Our Heads

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

Suppose the Iran war somehow reaches a conclusion, and we have a good, rational, democratically-elected regime in Tehran.  What would be a first act of such a regime?  In today’s world they’d need to start a nuclear weapons program as an absolute requirement to maintain sovereignty.

And what would happen after that?  The clear answer to that question shows what is really on the table.  Trump would decide. His Board of Peace is no sideshow–Trump wants to run the world. That may sound great to a US audience, but only until the story collapses. We can see what that means now.

Trump is not worried that the world he has called into being is really chaotic and dangerous.  Since he is THE universal genius, he’ll just take care of it. But in the Iran war we see how little grasp he has on reality. The two-day surgical intervention is out of control in all directions. We’re not always going to be in charge and not always even going to know where our actions will lead. Who knows where we’ll be after a Presidential version of Trump’s six bankruptcies.

The only way we know to control major wars is a system for international governance where war is to the greatest extent possible off the table.  Competing spheres of influence don’t work. International governance isn’t easy either, but we’re all lucky to have lived through such a period.  For all the flaws it mostly worked for peace.  We’re now in an era where many players now think they need nuclear weapons, and the restraints on acts of war are weakening.  Thus far no one has used those weapons, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling we’re getting closer to the brink.

There are other factors too. Computer-controlled drones have clearly changed the rules for warfare in ways we are only beginning to understand.  They have already overturned traditional measures of military strength in both Ukraine and Iran.  They’re cheap, readily available, and we can’t even protect our own radar systems from them. AI is another destabilizer at an even earlier stage of understanding.  Uncertainty and volitily in national assessments of strength or weakness risk wars of overconfidence or paranoia–with weapons of horrendous power.  More than ever we need to restore a framework for stability.

There are really only two ways to do that:  stability is either imposed by dictatorial fiat or assembled by common effort.  The first is Trmp’s vision, but it simply doesn’t match reality.  The second is something we have to make work.  For that everyone needs a stake in the game. There is a base of common interest from both climate change and the obvious risks for war, but the common effort takes more than that–a commitment to international well-being. Obama was able to do something of the sort with the unanimity he achieved around climate change, but it was unstable.  There was too much to be gained in the short term by cheating, and once cheating became respectable, it was hard to fight. Now we’ve got Trump’s sabotage instead.

That doesn’t say the effort was wrong or naive, just hard. Reality won’t wait, and the risks are only increasing. It’s worth noting that there are other success stories for cooperation among nations. The US itself is one–individual states had to decide (with some difficulty) to give up sovereignty for the union to succeed. The EU–despite its bad press–is another one, with prosperity after centuries of bitter wars. Shared prosperity can work, but it requires national governments to make sure benefits reach their populations. In addition here in the US people need to realize that an international order isn’t selling out our national self-interest—in fact we’re doing that today as an unreliable partner in any enterprise.

At some point climate change will become too serious to pretend away.  However, as has been noted many times, by then it may well be too late.  Similarly for war.  We don’t have a choice.  We have to recognize what is at stake now.  We can’t let Trump’s ego wreck the one marvelous world we’ve been granted.

Jobs per Dollar

/ ontheoutside / 2 Comments

As an indication of where the economy is going, someone should calculate permanent jobs created per dollar of capital expenditure for all the new datacenter construction.  That’s probably a new low for expenditures of this magnitude.  It’s more complicated to predict the effect on jobs in the rest of the economy, but that’s most probably negative.

It’s hard for me to think this doesn’t say something about the world we’re going toward.  It’s not so much that there will be a shortage of jobs overall as of good jobs.  What is it that we are going to use to bargain with employers?  Traditional education is about knowledge and capability.  In our familiar world it takes years to put together the package that an employable person represents, and there are many distinct niches that need to be filled.  In the new world, knowledge is more readily accessible, the capabilities required are more generic, and staffing levels may be reduced by efficiencies.  We’re only beginning to see how that will shake out.

As we noted last time, the private sector is not good at managing effects of radical change—on people and on the environment.  On the other hand, we’re talking about really significant productivity improvements, so in principle that should be a good thing.  But that’s not going to happen by itself. It sure didn’t happen at the start of the industrial revolution—for most of humanity that meant misery and war.

In this anniversary of the American Revolution there is a relevant quote from the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”  That’s now true worldwide.  In this time of economic ferment, climate change, and nuclear weapons we had better learn to work together for global well-being or there may be nothing left at all.

The Real Deal on Rare Earths

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

The subject of “rare earths” is everywhere—now that Trump has discovered that not everyone he bullies backs down. (Like most bullies he clearly never thought of risks beforehand.)  But it is shocking how much of the discussion is both wrong and wrong-headed.

Let’s start with what’s wrong.  First of all, the set of rare earths includes 17 chemical elements that share some chemical properties, but whose significance is individual not collective.  Particular elements are important in particular ways.  Availability and processing requirements are not the same either.  So if Trump announces that we’re going to get rare earths from, say, Ukraine that may be relevant to an important issue or it may not be.  Similarly when someone announces with fanfare that we’re going to start processing rare earths somewhere outside of China, that may or may not have any importance at all—depending on what it is.

All that sounds like we need a lot of new information that would be hard to track down, but actually that’s not true.  There is an excellent, widely-available report from an unbiased source that goes right down the line on everything you would like to know.  And the answer is that there is nothing we are doing that is going to change China’s leverage any time soon (measured in years of course).  And that’s the news about rare earths. 

Wrong-headed is a different issue.  The important thing to realize is that the rare earth problem is NOT one-of-a-kind.  The rare earth problem is what happens when you don’t plan ahead for what the world is going to look like in the future.  There are two changes that made this problem happen:

  • The technology environment changed, so that suddenly these elements went from exotic to strategic.
  • The political environment changed to one of economic war with everyone, so that the US suddenly has to become economically independent of everyone whose arms it can’t twist. There is a strategic question with China, but we forced this issue by declaring war.

The impact of item one is only going to get worse.  Trump is preoccupied with the past (e.g. the 1950’s) not the future, so all kinds of necessary technologies won’t be here. He has done all he can to kill funding for future-oriented research at NIH and universities.  His climate denial has ceded leadership in all the (many) sustainable energy technologies to China.  His anti-trust policies favor existing large companies over new entrants.  He even told the troops on the aircraft carrier he visited that they should be happy it still used steam pressure to launch planes instead of the newer electronic system on the (single) new Chinese carrier.  We can count on being behind the eight-ball for the foreseeable future, and it’s going to be hard to reassemble the infrastructure to catch up.

On item two we have only begun to appreciate what it means to be at economic war with everyone.  We’re still in an environment where the US has many historical mutually-advantageous relationships with partners.  We benefit as participants in a common enterprise.  All such partners now find they are under attack.  Trump relies upon factors such as NATO membership and US market size to coerce other countries to do his bidding.  Neither form of coercion is permanent, as everyone can see that even Canada is under attack.  Resources and support come into question.  Whether we like it or not, allies are important.  And that’s not just a military matter.  It’s a basis of our economic strength and our standard of living.

Rare earths are no one-of-a-kind deal.  They’re a bellwether for our future.  

Mathematics and Politics

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

It strikes me that there is something to be said about mathematics and politics that goes beyond just numbers.  Mathematics, because it is a logical system, guards against some kinds of sloppy thinking that can get in the way or be exploited in propaganda.  Here are a few examples.

  1. Not every function is bounded or even linear.

I’m starting here because it came up in a previous discussion of climate change. Damage from climate change is not bounded or even linear.  The world just gets that much farther from what human civilization was built to deal with.

Destruction from climate change increases exponentially with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  As noted there is no such thing as a “new normal” or even a price limit for the damage done by a ton of CO2.   So there is no alternative to preemptive action, hard as that is for any society to achieve.

2. Negative numbers are just as real as positive ones.

In our national budgets positive expenditure are discussed in terms of things bought:  for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.  Deficits are abstractions: possible effects on the financing costs for the national debt for example.  In fact deficits are negatives of things bought—things not bought.  They have to be evaluated by tradeoff of what that money was spent on versus what now isn’t going to be bought—for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.

3. You can’t understand a function of two variables without looking at values for both.

It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: if you have a function of two variables, you can’t understand anything by looking at variation in one.  Performance of Trump’s golden dome depends on how well the new defense handles the offense coming at it.  We already had a much-touted proposal like that under Reagan—his Star Wars.  That was an expensive program that sounded great and went absolutely nowhere—no successful tests even of highly-simplified versions!

We’re told the time has come to build another one, because defensive capabilities have increased so much that it’s time to finish Reagan’s job.  To my knowledge, no one has said a single word about what has changed with the offense.

4. You have to be able to learn from applicable results in different contexts.

This may seem abstract, but some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been made by recognizing that results in one area can be brought to bear on seemingly different classes of problems.  Life is like that, just generally.  You have to understand how things work, so you can apply what you know to new problems.

What have we as humans learned about how a society should function?  Most of all that chaos is a bad thing.  If we are going to live together successfully, we need rules of behavior and at least mutual tolerance.  There is also some notion of caring for the weak as an essential part of social cohesion.  That is built into essentially all successful cultures and all religions, because chaos is unstable, exhausting, and dangerous. It also undermines the stability needed for economic growth and prosperity.

For international relations we have nonetheless chosen to ignore that experience, on the grounds that of course we are going to win, rule the world, and steal everything of value from everyone else. That’s not new as motivation, but it is precisely the mentality that our species has learned is self-destructive.  Christianity has a few apt quotes:  “As a man sows so shall he reap” or more to the point “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.

 In a age of proliferating nuclear weapons and accelerating climate change, that’s not something you want to think about too much.

5. There is one more relevant point:  not all functions are continuous.

It is natural to believe in continuity, that the features of one’s current life are somehow normal and can be relied upon.  That is felt as reality, not complacency.

But history has shown over and over again that there are no guarantees.  It’s all up to us.